Monday 11 November 2013

Garmin 205 or 305 battery replacement

These GPS running watches are easy to repair/refurbish as long as you catch any watch that starts to play up soon enough.....

both of these watches are basically the same design except on has extra circuitry for the heart monitor, but physically the cases are the same. Garmin charge £50 (ish) to get a refurbished watch back, which I think is far too much to pay when all you might need is a damn good clean out and/or a new battery

The battery you need is the same one/similar to the ipod mini battery, just do a search on ebay and you'll find one the last one I ordered cost an horrendous £2.79 all in including postage


all you'll need is a thin bladed screwdriver or a penknife or in some cases where the glue Garmin use has degraded with sweat/water ingress ....your fingernails will do. 

I've found the best angle of attack if you're right handed is to try the bottom left or right of the watch just above the buttons you'll see a seam, that is where the unit splits apart, if you can get your thumbnail in there and it starts to split open, it doesn't take very much pressure to get it apart.....



Once inside you'll see where the top part electrically joins to the bottom part by spring loaded contacts, don't worry when you pull the watch apart they are two units and are separate items and are not connected by any thin wires or ribbon cables.

Once apart you can prise off the battery as it's only glued down with a blob of glue, be careful though because the battery (obviously) is attached by wires to the base of the unit, I usually cut the wires off quite close to the battery as this gives you plenty of wire to play with when fitting the new battery and there is enough space inside the case to contain the extra wire.

The new battery fitting may require you to snap off a few bits of plastic underneath where the battery sits, as the new battery is just a tad larger than the old one.

You'll need a soldering iron to do the job probably because simply twisting the wires together will not last with the movement of the watch over time, once soldered together you MUST insulated them against each other, they mustn't touch...I use a bit of insulating tape to separate them and tuck them down by the side of the new battery.....

take a look at the contacts on the top of the Garmin shell and the bottom make sure they are clean and do not have corrosion (see picture)

                            bottom of Garmin

If you have corrosion like this and it's not too bad you can clean it up  with a small paintbrush and some toilet limescale remover (it's acid basically) but make sure you wipe off and wipe down with a cotton bud and water to remove the acid afterwards, and dry it thoroughly afterwards....you MUST neutralize the acid !!! 

The one above wasn't too bad I removed the tarnish with a very dilute solution and an artists paintbrush, make sure the contacts in the other top part of the shell are clean as well, I've even used a toothbrush to get the worst of it off, but be careful with the top contacts they are quite delicate.....

                              top of Garmin


as you can see the 2nd & 3rd pin on this Garmin are tarnished through sweat/water ingress.
Also check the tiny speaker which is glued to the bottom of the Garmin shell, if it's badly damaged/corroded, simply clip/cut the wires and remove it and then insulate the wires with tape and tuck them under the battery, not many people miss the beep and for £11 (ish) for a new speaker its simple not worth replacing. once you've removed the battery, you'll have to seal the holes the sound escapes from normally to stop any more water/sweat getting into the device. (more on that later)


Once you're happy everything is cleaned up 

Clean the mating surfaces of the Garmin both top and bottom, clearing out all the old glue, as much as you can anyway, I use a small flat-bladed screwdriver which is  good enough for that job, take care not to cut into any of the circuitry of the lower part of the Garmin whilst doing this.....


once you're happy push the two surfaces together and hold between your thumb and finger and turn on your Garmin, the new battery should have enough life in it to fire it up as Lithium Ion batteries are always partially charged when you get them.

Once you're happy the battery connection is good and the watch seems to function as intended you're good to go onto the next stage.

Sealing the Garmin....

I've found that using a wooden toothpick/cocktail stick and clear bathroom sealant works best but you of course can use anything you like as long as it's waterproof, something like Araldyte but it's unlikely you will ever get it apart again with as much ease as the cuckoo spit glue Garmin seems to be using (joke).... stay away from plastic glues (airfix type) they are not water resistant over time.....and they don't adhere to the type of plastic the Garmin is made of...... contact adhesive is also not a good idea, it's too gelatinous to apply and you'll end up making a right mess of the joint.

Apply enough sealant to form a good seal all the way around the garmin, try not to allow the sealant to drip over the buttons inside the shell.... for obvious reasons...... it doesn't however matter if some of the sealant comes out of the sides you can always wipe off with a damp cloth once you clamped the Garmin together. 

if you've removed a corroded battery you'll need to put a blob of sealant over the holes and press it in with your finger so that it completely seals the holes, ideally you want to see it come out of the other side to ensure a water tight seal.

as for clamping the Garmin together you can use anything, several clothes pegs, insulating tape, a g-clamp, a vice even  ...whatever just do not apply too much pressure....just enough to push the two parts together and keep them there.

leave it to dry for 24 hours, (don't rush it) unclamp and you're good to go :)

obviously give your Garmin a full charge several hours should do ......as the new battery is much higher capacity than the 720mAh Garmin one you've removed. 

Happy Running :)

ps/ Obviously if you do this to a watch which is in warranty you'll lose your warranty, goes without saying........






Sunday 27 October 2013

Well Well Well





I've just been contacted by somebody on facebook who pretty ruined my life back in 1982 along with my then wife Deborah Brabrook.....I'd just been posted to West Germany to a place called Celle, well to be more precise Sheuen near Celle.

My new wife at the time Deborah and I couldn't get married accommodation or married quarters in Celle, so a Soldier I'd befriended whilst at Celle offered to share his flat for us to stay at so we could be together as a married couple.

Great I thought we can be together at last.......

How wrong I was, my "Christian" wife at the time (spawn of satan damaged goods more like)  Deborah who was over the moon at being reunited with her loved one ....."me" allegedly...  .....decided within a few weeks...........to sleep with the very same friend who I had arranged to stay at his flat.... his wife "Sarah" knew nothing about it......neither did I until she (Deborah) weirdly confessed.....

Needless to say she didn't stop there she went through quite a few "soldiers" whilst I was posted there, I think the term is a dose of salts.....lets put it this way far too many to count on two hands...and quite a few after I left the army .....why I didn't dump her then I have no idea, I suppose I had this hard wired brain at the time that marriage was forever.... 

But had I dumped her then....I wouldn't have had two beautiful daughters much later in life...and yes they are mine, despite her many indiscretions....  so everything has a silver lining I guess if only to produce two wonderful daughters which I will never regret.....

Anyway.....

So fast forward 30 odd years and up pops the bloke I had thought as my friend all those years ago .....his first words were ..........."I apologise.....it's Paddy" that's all I needed ............ Sorry.....he was sorry ......it had obviously burned into his conscious all these years later..........

that meant WAY  more to me than 22 years of marriage to my first wife.......he was sorry he'd screwed over a friendship over a mere wife............


after all these years later.........amazing ..........


Paddy I salute you !!!!

ps/ I never once got an apology off my ex wife for anything.....she was after all perfect (in her eyes)

Saturday 26 October 2013

Samsung Galaxy S II (thinking its charging all the time)

I'd thought I'd share some information about this phone to stop people spending money on getting it fixed unnecessarily.

I was bought this phone by my wife on my 50th birthday in March of this year, and to be frank it's a brilliant phone, it has performed faultlessly since it was switched on for the first time.

However like most electrical things they do suffer from wear and tear, and although the phone has been looked after and has barely a blemish on it, it did fail on me.

Namely the usb charging port, initially I didn't think there was anything wrong with my phone other than the battery not lasting very long, so I downloaded battery saving apps etc thinking my battery was on it's way out, but they didn't show anything untoward.

So being an utter unashamed geek I decided to get to the bottom of it and rooted my phone to get into the internals and see what was going on.

I found out that a wakelock was keeping my phone from deep sleeping, a wakelock is basically a kernel mechanism for Android power management. When a thread holds a wakelock, the kernel will refrain from entering a low-power state.

Now the wakelock in question was "vbus_present" which basically means it thinks it's plugged into the charger/usb port.

So I cleaned out the usb port on the phone with a soft toothbrush, then proceeded to blow it out with compressed air, neither of these things worked.....

Eventually I decided to look at the port with a high magnification camera from where I work, it was pretty obvious the central spade connector was pushed down away from the position it should have been in.

So after removing the battery and power source and with the help of a small flat bladed screwdriver I gently lifted the central spade (it's VERY small) upwards towards the screen side, until it was central, not thinking for a minute that it would do anything because I thought the usb charger side would straighten the spade out when inserted, and at this stage I had already called Orange (EE) and Phones4U to find out how to return my beloved phone for repair. 

To my surprise the wakelock disappeared. A fluke I thought....no it wasn't it's been consistently fixed since this rather bizarre fix I stumbled across.

Just for information the USB charging unit in these phones is easily replaced by yourself for around £10 and you can get the part from here.


So don't be fooled into paying large amounts of money to get your phone fixed

it's 8 screws and the job is done... there are even video's online to show you how.


Sunday 24 March 2013

Well I've hit the half century


It was ominously looming on me my 50th year on this planet..... I have to say I wasn't looking forward to my birthday.... 

My ever thoughtful and darling wife had been deceiving me for weeks, I knew something was happening but I've got to be honest I had no idea what she had planned.... she finished work early and then when I finished work,  she turned up in the car without the kids, which immediately got me on edge.... we drove, and drove... it started to get dark, we still drove out into the wilds of Wales....  

then the water pump blew on the car..... we sat there looking at each other, Andrea had a bit of a melt down because the surprise had been scuppered by the BMW's water pump going and dumping our entire coolant over the road, and we were out in the middle of nowhere... and by nowhere I mean absolutely nowhere even the local sheep were miles away.....

So we had a discussion after the minor hysterics and I explained that logically to decide what to do that she had to tell me where we were going .... So I asked would we lose any money if we cancelled, apparently yes..... all of it.... Soooooooo I spoke to our friendly garage owner on the phone and he gave me a number of somebody local in St Clears who did recovery..... and then I phoned my parents and my father eventually picked us up from our wilderness break down, and carried us to our final destination...... The £95 sting of the vehicle recovery marred things somewhat, and we knew we'd have a massive repair bill for the water pump (well I did)

My father bless him turned up about an hour and a half after we broke down and drove us to our final destination.......I have to say I was blown away with this 5 star hotel, they upgraded us because of our unlucky car troubles and probably because they felt sorry for us, but I wasn't complaining ... it was stunning, the whole place was pure sumptuous luxury.... They had a treatment room/spa.... hell there isn't any point in me describing it on here..... 

just go here and take a look at the place 


Amazing place.....

We were booked in for two nights weekend break and it was worth every penny......

Having to go down to the bottom of the enormous drive and wait for the local bus to take us into Crickhowell did raise a few eyebrows with the locals on the bus.... We were the only guests who didn't have our own car... but I've got to say it didn't dampen the weekend very much at all....

My wife also sprang a surprise visit by our friends on the Saturday night which was a lovely surprise.....

I've also been rocketed into the 20th century with an Android smart phone, which I'm still getting to grips with......(which by the way I'd managed to lose on a walk within hours of getting it... but it was recovered.....eventually)

Overall I've had the most fantastic 50th birthday a person could wish for.....and I'm married to the most thoughtful, loving and beautiful  uber fit wife a man could wish for :) 

Sunday 17 February 2013

Adobe Flashplayer & older PC's & Linux



I'm putting this up here so other Linux nerds don't spend hours figuring out what I have......

I have an old Athlon XP 2800 system knocking around which was earmarked for Freya (my 5 year old daughter.....running linux of course.... start them young I say ).... everything went swimmingly with the installation until I tried to use flash... no go, no error messages just "cannot load flash plugin".

Now I'm no stranger to hardware/software/operating systems, it's been my bread and butter for many many years.....(you don't need to know how long...but lets just say I'm an elder geek, in fact I was a geek before being a geek was fashionable....sigh) 

I went through all of the hoops installing from different sources, using different browsers, setting rights on the libflashplayer.so file, you name it I did it ....nothing nada, same error.

I initially thought it was maybe because of the low memory the pc had, but no.....

it's a really really simple fix

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep flags


which will look something like mine below except it won't have the SSE2 flag

fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good nopl extd_apicid pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy 3dnowprefetch lbrv



if it doesn't have SSE2 in it, you'll have to go back to the 11.1.102.63 version which is here 

that will solve your problem, unpack that into /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins directory or wherever your browser is trying to load it from and it will work..... you can even just overwrite the newer libflashplayer.so file .....

Job done